Bloody hell, they're filming The Dark is Rising. I know this novel/novel sequence (by Susan Cooper) is very close to some Barbeloid's hearts.
I'm thrilled, but was at first concerned that the film may lack the edge of danger I always feel when I reread the novels. With a big mish-mash of magic music, a bit of celtic, Welsh Arthurian nonsense, and an oversimplistic binary morality, will it be twee? Will it be worse than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - passable, with horny centaurs, but no heart?
Then I wondered if actually, the binary belief system may be the thing to save it. I don't like certainties, and I know that black and white thinking is the hallmark of a cult. However, the novels have a lot of complexity and intricacy, and figures from all kinds of mythology, but under it all there's the Light, and the Dark, and even typing that gives me tingles. It's very well set-up and ancient in the novels. And they show how the Light can be as exploitative and ruthless and cold as the Dark - I hope that this isn't excluded.
IMDB with cast here.
I think they may have the feel of it, if not the physical specifics (in brief, because I don't get to geek much: Ian McShane is insufficiently white-haired, deep voiced and tall for Merriman, but since watching Deadwood I can believe he's sufficiently aqualine and sinister. Ecclestone is not a young, redhaired chap, but I suspect he'll be excellent.
I understand a lot better, now, the concerns of Tolkien fans - I want to see the drowned land, I want to see the skeletal horse, but obviously I don't want to see them screwed up. One fantastic possibility is following through the visual symbols in Cooper's work, and elaborating on them. There are, for example, shields which crop up all over the place - you have to (I had to) read the books quite doggedly to extract the connections, but I think they could make for a wodnerful thematic unity in a film version.
Enough of my fannish waffling. Waffle yourselves. |
